CICER, the Centre in Ireland for Clinical guideline support and Evidence Reviews, has commenced research to develop and pilot a tool to estimate the cost of infectious disease outbreaks in public acute hospitals. 

Hospital outbreaks of infectious diseases (caused by microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and viruses) are an ongoing challenge for the healthcare system. They can lead to longer hospitalisation, prolonged illness, or mortality for infected individuals. At the same time, antimicrobial resistance is increasing, making it more challenging to treat hospital infections, and potentially further increasing the length of stay for affected patients. This can result in other hospital services such as elective surgery being postponed or cancelled, in turn increasing the resources required and overall costs attributable to hospital outbreaks. These hospital-acquired infections can also have a significant impact on the welfare and finances of patients and their families.

At present, there is no standardised approach to estimate the cost of disease outbreaks in Irish acute hospitals. This research aims to provide a tool that will aid understanding of the financial impacts of disease outbreaks to inform resource allocation and further investments in infection prevention and control measures.

The proposed research project consists of several components. Scoping meetings and other information-gathering activities will help to assess current processes for recording and reporting outbreaks and their resource use in acute hospitals in Ireland. Second, a systematic review of scientific literature and other web sources will identify any existing costing tools in use internationally. Finally, a costing tool will be developed and piloted to estimate costs of infectious disease outbreaks in public acute hospitals in Ireland. 

An expert advisory group (EAG) will be convened for this project, including clinical experts, policy-makers, service providers, public and patient representatives, and methodological experts.

Findings will be published in due course, later this year.

This research is funded by the Health Research Board under grant number ESCG-2024-002.

ENDS

Further information:

Marty Whelan, Head of Communications and Stakeholder Engagement 085 805 5202 / mwhelan@hiqa.ie 
 
Notes to editor:

• The Centre in Ireland for Clinical guideline support and Evidence Reviews (CICER) has today published the following document:
  • Protocol: Development of a tool for the collection of costs attributable to infectious disease outbreaks in public acute hospitals
• CICER is funded by the Health Research Board (HRB) and hosted by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA). CICER produces evidence reviews and provides methodological support for the development of National Clinical Guidelines, which are published by the National Clinical Effectiveness Committee.
• HRB supports excellent research that improves people’s health, patient care and health service delivery. They aim to ensure that new knowledge is created and then used in policy and practice. In doing so, they support health system innovation and create new enterprise opportunities.
• This study has been requested by the Department of Health as part of Ireland's second One Health National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance
• The specific objectives of this study are to:
  • understand the processes for reporting outbreaks in public acute hospitals in Ireland;
  • ascertain the types of data routinely collected during outbreaks;
  • identify ways to measure costs and resource utilisation in the management of outbreaks;
  • review tools developed internationally to measure cost and or resource utilisation attributable to outbreaks;
  • develop an outbreak costing tool for use by healthcare workers, to help in estimating  key unit costs and resources used during outbreaks; and 
  • pilot the outbreak costing tool with healthcare workers who manage outbreaks in public acute hospitals in Ireland.